From TruthDig
By Chris Hedges

The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

Our economic crisis—despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford’s marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest incarnation, Brüno—barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.

American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture. New desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate culture assured us, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural homogenization. American culture, or cultures, was replaced with junk culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the ash heap, we survey the ruins. The very slogans of advertising and mass culture have become the idiom of common expression, robbing us of the language to make sense of the destruction. We confuse the manufactured commodity culture with American culture.

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From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine.

“A forensic examiner found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs,” the magazine’s Jane Mayer writes in the magazine’s June 22nd issue. “Military pathologists classified the case a homicide.” The date of the murder was not given.

“No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as a result of mistreatment,” Mayer notes.

An earlier report, by John Hendren in The Los Angeles Times indicted other torture killings. And Human Rights First says nearly 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hendren reported that one Manadel Jamadi died “of blunt-force injuries” complicated by “compromised respiration” at Abu Ghraib prison “while he was with Navy SEALs and other special operations troops.” Another victim, Abdul Jaleel, died while gagged and shackled to a cell door with his hands over his head.” Yet another prisoner, Maj. Gen. Abid Mowhosh, former commander of Iraq’s air defenses, “died of asphyxiation due to smothering and chest compression” in Qaim, Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

Finally, the Supreme Court has made a good decision on civil liberties.

The justices ruled when she was 13, Savana Redding had her rights violated when school officials insisted that she be strip-searched for the possession of—hold on here!—ibuprofen.

She had to strip to her underwear, then pull her bra and panties out and expose her privates. School officials found no drugs.

Savana called it “the most humiliating experience I’ve ever had.”

Ruling 8-1, the Justices concluded that Safford Middle School went too far.

That’s a welcome departure for the court, which has steadily increased the authority of school districts to intrude on the rights of students, with random drug testing of athletes and anyone in extracurricular activities. The court also has invited excessive monitoring of school newspapers.

For once, the court, almost unanimously, made a course correction.

The only dissenter was Clarence Thomas, who after sleepwalking through 18 years on the court, has finally settled on a role for himself other than that of Scalia’s second vote. And that is, to be even further to the right of Scalia. Earlier this week, Thomas was the sole member of the court who wanted to overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

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From Common Dreams
By Amy Goodman

Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. Cell phones can capture video and send it wirelessly to the Internet. People can send eyewitness accounts, photos and videos, with a few keystrokes, to thousands or even millions via social networking sites. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.

A Wall Street Journal report this week claimed that the “Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.” The article named Nokia Siemens Networks as the provider of equipment capable of “deep packet inspection.” DPI, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, “enables Internet Service Providers to intercept virtually all of their customers’ Internet activity, including Web surfing data, e-mail and peer-to-peer downloads.”

Nokia Siemens has refuted the allegation, saying in a press release that the company “has provided Lawful Intercept capability solely for the monitoring of local voice calls in Iran.” It is this issue, of what is legal, that must be addressed. “Lawful intercept” means that people can be monitored, located and censored. Global standards need to be adopted that protect the freedom to communicate, to dissent.

China has very sophisticated Internet monitoring and censoring capabilities, referred to as “the Great Firewall of China,” which attracted increased attention prior to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. A document leaked before a U.S. Senate human rights hearing implicated Cisco, a California-based maker of Internet routers, in marketing to the Chinese government to accommodate monitoring and censorship goals. The Chinese government now requires any computer sold there after July 1, 2009, to include software called “Green Dam,” which critics say will further empower the government to monitor Internet use.

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From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By Tom Burghardt

You have to hand it to Pentagon securocrats and their corporate cronies, they never miss an opportunity to demonize, vilify or otherwise slander domestic political dissent as “terrorism.”

The American Civil Liberties Union reported June 10 that “Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.”

According to the civil liberties’ watchdog: “Among the multiple-choice questions included in its Level 1 Antiterrorism Awareness training course, the DoD asks the following: ‘Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorist activity?’ To answer correctly, the examinee must select ‘protests’.”

Yes, you read that correctly. The Pentagon has designed a training system that puts you in the crosshairs! And why not? Back in 2003 Mike Van Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) said of antiwar demonstrators brutally attacked by riot cops at the Port of Oakland during a protest against the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq,

“You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest),” said Van Winkle, of the state Justice Department. “You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.” (Ian Hoffman, Sean Holstege and Josh Richman, (”Intelligence Agency Does Not Distinguish Between Terrorism and Peace Activism,” Oakland Tribune, May 18, 2003)

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From The NY Times
Editorial

Once again, the country is learning about how the federal government has been exceeding its legal authority and violating Americans’ most basic rights in the name of fighting terrorism.

In a disturbing article in The Times on Wednesday, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau said that Congressional investigations suggest that the National Security Agency continues to routinely collect Americans’ telephone calls and e-mail messages — perhaps by the millions.

These sweeps seem unconnected to specific terrorism investigations, and the communications are entirely domestic. The law does not allow fishing trips through Americans’ communications and only permits the government to read e-mails or listen to phone calls in which one party is “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States.

The government offered its usual response: Oops. A spokesman for the intelligence community said any “overcollection” was inadvertent and “when such errors are identified,” they are quickly corrected.

That excuse wore thin long ago. We heard it when the F.B.I. was caught abusing its power to issue “national security letters” to short-circuit constitutional protections. We heard it in April, when the Obama administration first acknowledged that the N.S.A. was exceeding even the expanded authority it was given last year to monitor international calls and e-mail traffic.

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From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

Wanna hear a good Holocaust joke? Or a rib-tickler about lynching? How about starving Ethiopians? You’ll bust a gut.

I spent an eerie couple of hours recently on the wrong side of the sicko line, checking out hate sites and hate jokes. What’s the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead . . .

I won’t go on, but we have to think about this. Hate crimes and hate speech are, you could say, democracy’s paradox. Let’s start with a definition: An “ordinary crime” (as though there could ever be anything ordinary about, say, murder) morphs into a “hate crime” when it’s primary or, perhaps, entire point is to amplify speech, perfectly legal in and of itself, that targets and dehumanizes a particular group. Indeed, a hate crime is a perverted form of altruism in that it isn’t generally committed for personal gain, but rather, for social intimidation and control.

I would add that hate crimes also reflect values that are socially marginal. James von Brunn, who had once blogged that Hitler’s worst mistake was that he didn’t gas the Jews, walks into Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum with a rifle and opens fire, killing a security guard. The judgment against him is instant and visceral: He’s a violent loner nut. Look at his eyes. He’s not there. His humanity has been replaced with an ideology of hate. And this judgment begins to generate both fear and counter-hatred.

I confess to those emotions, especially as I wandered through some of the sites that would have stoked von Brunn’s fires, like, oh, tightrope.cc, with a logo that proclaims, “It’s not illegal to be White . . . yet” and flaunts an illustration of a hand holding a noose.

Click on “n-jokes” and you’ll find the humor equivalent of snuff porn or graphic photos of dead Iraqis: a hundred or so short jokes, which I took the trouble to categorize. The biggest bunch of them, a good 30 percent, could be called “murder is funny” jokes, celebrating lynching, gas ovens, starvation and he-men, a la von Brunn, shooting off their rifles. The second largest category, about 25 percent, sucked humor out of the gross dehumanization of the target subjects (African-Americans, Africans, Jews, Latinos and Chinese). A small group of jokes extolled the joys of slave ownership, with the rest of them resurrecting various long-dead ethnic and racial stereotypes.

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From The Regressive Antidote
By David Michael Green

When I hear big old fat white male bloviators like Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh calling Sonia Sotomayor “racist”, just one thought comes to mind: Why are these regressives endorsing her to be the next associate justice of the Supreme Court?

I mean, since when did racism become a problem in their circles?

Since when wasn’t it perfectly acceptable?

Indeed, since when was it not a political tool of choice for winning power, if not a preferred lifestyle?

Do you remember the lovely Limbaugh leading the charge for civil rights, back in the Sixties? Remember how he stood side-by-side with Martin Luther King, getting fire-hosed, going to jail, and marching until he had blisters on his blisters, all for the cause of fighting racism in America?

You don’t? Funny, neither do I.

I do remember, however, that he once said this: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”

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From Common Wonders
By Robert C. Koehler

Take empathy out of the concept of justice and what you have left are rules: simple, mechanical, lifeless.

“Are we really going to insist,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn asked the other day, after President Obama talked about closing down the Guantanamo detention facility, “that the jihadist with a suitcase nuke captured in Times Square be read his Miranda rights . . .?”

In other words, who needs all this complication — the luxury of rights and other froo-frah — when we’ve got so much evil bearing down on us? Oh, Republicans! They operate on a spectrum that runs all the way from mockery to fear as they pursue their single-minded assault on the new president and the agenda he was elected to implement.

If you’re tired of the great American experiment, or never quite believed in it, or have too much to gain by circumventing it, then you’re on the team. The party platform is pretty clear: Let us hollow out every core American value, worship the shell (think Founding Fathers, think Our Precious Freedoms) and quietly keep wealth and power where they belong, in the hands of the entitled.

So, empathy. Can controversy get more inane? The Republicans are aghast that Obama would impose an “empathy standard” on his nominee for the Supreme Court, as though this word could be removed from anything that is human.

Well, it can, of course. This was the George W. Bush era. In case you’ve forgotten: “Once off the plane, they were ordered to assume kneeling positions for hours on end; those who tried to sit back were hit and kicked. These men had just been subjected to a nauseating 20-hour flight from Afghanistan and were now hunched over in the night air without the faintest idea of where they were.” Thus did civil rights attorney Marc Falkoff describe conditions at the Guantanamo detention facility, in an interview back in 2005, when the world was first learning about the hideous U.S. abuse of prisoners.

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From Mother Jones
By David Corn

Dick Cheney, as vice president, was once the president of the Senate. Now he could become the target of a Senate investigation, for the Senate intelligence committee is in the position–and perhaps has the obligation–to answer this question: did Cheney tell senior members of Congress the truth about the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation practices (a.k.a. torture) during hush-hush briefings on Capitol Hill?

Last week, The Washington Post revealed that in 2005 Cheney oversaw at least four classified briefings of congressional leaders about the interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. This was part of an effort to bolster congressional support for the program. Curiously–or not so curiously–the CIA didn’t note Cheney’s participation in these sessions when it recently released a list of the briefings the agency had provided to Congress regarding its interrogation methods.

Cheney’s involvement in the CIA briefings began at a time when several senior Democrats were calling for an investigation of these interrogation techniques. In one of these sessions, Cheney met with Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), then the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller III (D-WV), then the senior Democrat on the committee. (Also present were Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the top Democrat on that committee.) And it is this particular meeting that falls within the boundaries of the investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program now being conducted by the Senate intelligence committee. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the current chair of the intelligence committee, is not saying whether her probe will cover Cheney’s participation in these briefings.

Read more Torture Probe